A disquiet follows my soul
by pants2match
Summary: "They've spent the last thirteen years in a sort of flux, never still enough to be a couple, a family." — Alex arrives home. Post-Demons


Alex doesn't even realise she's given the driver her address until the taxi pulls into her driveway.

—

Light pours from the entryway and it's a sight she hasn't seen for a long, long time. She knows before she even opens the door that every light leading from the front door to their bedroom will be aglow. Even in their tiny first apartment neither of them ever came home to darkness if the other was there.

She follows them like breadcrumbs, flipping the switches as she goes.

The last light is on her nightstand, dimmed to a point where it's barely lit. She reads best at night, he sleeps best. A scratch on the record early in their relationship. She almost hates to admit to her sporadic romanticisms. (Forearms and wrists and hands riddled with oil and oven burns; papers and letters and books, dogeared and pristine alike; her natural colour, the regrowth after twelve months of varying shades of blonde and red back in her 20s.) But they're there and he lets her embrace them all the same. (Rolling up his sleeves, buying lamps that dim, running his fingers through her hair every chance he gets.)

She shrugs his discarded shirt on, wrapping it's excess around her frame. It's soft and worn and probably over a few years old. The covers of the bed are in the same state as they'd left them before the call came in. It's so much easier to keep it tidy with the both of them. Alex twists and turns and more often than not is left pulling every cover from the foot of the bed in the morning. She smiles at the sight.

Neither of them are obsessively tidy when it comes to their own space. It's something, she thinks, that they both take comfort in. Being apart from each other for such lengths, or being two doctors (an MD and a PhD) living together, sleeping together, for so many years seems to have bred a yearning to leave reminders of each other throughout their shared space. In the morning she'll see a water ring on his nightstand, and he'll see her blouse and pants and bra slung over the armchair.

For the first time in what feels like a decade, she's come home to a warm bed, husband included.

She extinguishes the lamp before curling into the mattress. Cases in small towns exhaust her more than any other. Not just because of the tight-knit that most small communities have, but because their accommodation is almost always awful. Alex Blake may be amenable to many things when it comes to her job, but nothing will compare to her need for her own comforts – a good bed, and a shower you're liable to scald yourself in.

The pillow top tempts her, passing out as is would be bliss.

The exhaustion is finally starting to alter her consciousness. For a moment (a moment that feels as though it's an eon), she's in an existential dream, between sleep and waking. There are few things she actually feels in that moment; the air, gravity pushing down on her chest; every stitch and fibre of cotton and nylon on her bare skin; the breath that enters and exits her husband's body beside her, the fleeting twitches of his leg as he slumbers.

Languid and heavy, she rolls, fitting herself into her furnace of a husband's back. She moves without thinking, dragging a hand over his back and wrapping around his midsection, and he stirs. Twenty years of her twists and turns and legs tangling the covers, he still awakens at the slightest touch.

He hums, utterly contented at the feel of his wife pressed against him. It vibrates through her chest and out her limbs like a shock and leaves her fingertips itching in it's wake.

"Welcome home."

She smiles against his shoulder, cheekbone pressing into his skin enough that he feels it, and he rolls towards her, lips a hair's breadth away from hers.

"Once upon a time," a breath, "that was my line." Her words are drowsy and low, almost slurred as if she'd been drinking.

"I guess it's mine, now."

She smiles again, barely, and her bottom lips brushes against her husband's as it pouts.

"Not any more."

—

She's scared. Last year, when he'd offered her the Harvard position, it wasn't just because of the job. After ten years of working with MSF he quits his job and asks her to come to Boston with him, the same ten years she'd spent trying to salvage her working reputation.

It wasn't just because of a decade's work, it was the thought of them not being able to be with each other anymore.

They've spent the last thirteen years in a sort of flux, never still enough to be a couple, a family.

The first year their son was dying, shuffled from home to hospital and back again countless times. It seemed that the moment after he closed his eyes – mother squeezed in the bed beside him arms encompassing his slight form, father with one hand stroking his hair and the other clutching to his own – was the first time either of his parents had taken a breath since the first seizure.

The next year is spent grieving. A state of polarity.

(Alex finally, _truly_ understands her mother; how she could spend a solid month in bed, unable to look up from her small-print book of crosswords for more than a moment at a time; and then on the thirty-second day, be unable to sit still, unable to go a minute without telling her husband or her children or her sister how very much she loved them.

A disquiet mind, her mother liked to call it, during the times where she spoke barely above a whisper, with a rueful smile as she traced her only daughter's face with her fingertips.)

A year, Doctors Alex and James Blake spent either wholly engrossed in each other, barely an inch between them, or absent, never sharing the same space but for – most nights – their bed.

Then, things changed. Alex was brought into the investigation that would bring ruin to her career; her self, even. She's spending whatever energy she may have on her work, not noticing the sixty-one days her husband spends agonising over a decision, over the offer of a true dream job. When he tells her, finally, about his former student, former protégé, something in her reacts; the initial drop effervescent, then at some point settling in her, and she tells him he should go.

He's in the sand and dust and sun and blood.

She's between working herself to the brink; and being intoxicated beyond reason, fucking her superior.

He comes home after it's all over, then he goes again because he's asked to, again.

For over a decade they never spend more than six months at a time together and it works, somehow.

("When we're together, it's like we're dating, and when we're not, I get stuff done")

—

Almost immediately, her reply slips out. She hadn't even thought it, doesn't realise it until she notices the shift in his face under the just-glow of the streetlamp outside.

The smile that comes is effortless and creeps into her muscles as easily as the blood that runs through their capillaries.

She anticipates her husband's baritone when his lips part, but it never comes. There's an uncertain smile trembling at the corner of his lips and maybe, she thinks, he's sure he's dreaming. Her nod is entirely too small to breathe any certainty into him.

She feels something that she's only ever been able to describe, maybe somewhat narcissistically, as Alex, as her true self. It washes over her.

"You don't hold the monopoly on quitting your dream job."

He smiles now.

He cups his wife's cheek, the pad of his thumb grazing just beneath where her eyelashes touch her skin. There's still a trace of black at the ends, and he thinks he can feel the makeup marking his skin with every flutter.

"We'll talk about it later, much, much later. A couple of days, without anything to think about. Nothing but…" she breathes it into him, _us_.

—

three uninteresting facts that i need to paperclip or sticky note to this:  
i. the bulk of this was written during a melancholia/the hours double feature.  
ii. my current binge on sharon raydor-centric fanfiction is hopefully a precursor to a relatively painless battlestar galactica rewatch sometime in the near future, hence the title  
iii. there are a few markers of my personal headcanon here  
a. alex's mum being bipolar or something akin to it – the mention of the letters in bully screams some sort of time in some kind of therapy, anger, guit, grief. plus it's a not to my all-time favourite abby lockhart (and maybe myself a bit).  
b. ethan dying not long before amerithrax – i doubt alex would have worked as hard as she did to restore her reputation if he had died after.  
c. some sort of relationship with erin before it all came crashing down – it something that seems almost canon at this point, but still.

just ftr this is a direct c/p from my ao3 (pants2match or whatever my penname here is while you're reading it) and there are some more drabble-type stories over there i haven't been bothered to put up here

— mañana


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